this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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Hi everyone!

I have around 200 DVD (with movies) that I’d want to backup in order to save them from rotting or physical media disappearance.

My most powerful computer with a DVD drive is a 2012 MacBook Pro upgraded to 16gb of Ram with an SSD running Fedora 42.

If possible, I’d want to keep all the bonuses of the movies, but I could also just backup the movies if keeping the whole disc is too difficult.

My goal would be to keep the original quality.

Also 6-7 discs are already skipping scenes even if the disc shows no damage.

I’ve bought some of these discs 20 years ago with my teenager pocket money so I wouldn’t want to lose them.

Thanks for the help.

As I own these discs and nothing would be illegal in my country, I thought it would be better to post here instead of the piracy community.

Edit: I guess I’ll use Make MKV Beta as it seems to work well and VLC can open the MKV files. Thanks for your help!

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[–] thehowlingnorth@lemmy.ca 23 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

You should be able to make a complete backup of a DVD to an iso file using dd.

https://www.systutorials.com/create-iso-image-on-linux/

[–] Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

But then would I be able to read them on any computer without burning them?

[–] Hawke@lemmy.world 25 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yes. You could use vlc or even as an iso file just open them as a virtual drive.

[–] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think VLC can also open them on Android.

[–] desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 20 hours ago

yep, unfortunately it doesn't seem to be able to read from actual drives though.

[–] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

That would get you an exact copy of the disk with everything on it. And also, while 200 DVDs sounded a lot, it's "only" 860GB (assuming 4,3GB/disk which I think is the most common for movies), so it's not stupidly expensive either. Obviously you'll want a RAID setup and most likely backups for that, so it's more than just a single 1TB drive, but still quite manageable.

[–] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 1 day ago

Actually, 8.5GB. Movies are typically on dual layer discs.

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

They would probably compress pretty well, I imagine.

[–] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Majority of the data (video) is already compressed as MPEG-2 so I'd think it doesn't compress very well. But if you don't have enough storage it's always an option to re-encode video with something more modern and achieve smaller file sizes from that. But that also removes at least DVD menu and other 'format dependent' options.

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago

Yeah, but I'm assuming there are many gains to be had if your compression method doesn't need to be stream decoded for real time playback.

[–] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 1 day ago

I used K3b for that. It can copy to image and even ignore errors if necessary, though I didn't yet have to try that. It's 8.5GB per disc, so get some 2TB HDD for that.